02/13/2025
✨🧡 Welcome to another edition of "Ask Your Vet" with Dr. Sykes—our 30th edition! 💙✨
This week, we’re answering an important question many clients ask:
"Why do you charge a deposit when I make an appointment?"
Dr. Sykes has the answer:
"Our current hospital policy is to require a deposit for appointments, surgeries, and boarding. If a client cancels any time more than 24 hours before their appointment, they will get their deposit back. If a client cancels with less than 24 hours before the appointment, the deposit is taken to pay for the cancellation/no-show fee. If the client attends the appointment, the deposit goes toward the final bill.
We understand taking deposits for appointments can be annoying for clients. It is not something we intended to do or want to do, and it is not something we take lightly. We were forced into requiring them.
At Clarksville Animal Clinic, we are a small, young, privately owned, single-veterinarian clinic. We try very hard to keep our prices fair. One of the goals at Clarksville Animal Clinic is to take the time to explain, in detail, anything that a client has questions about. We never want a client to leave feeling they didn’t get the attention they deserved. Also, we want to build relationships with our clients and their pets. To do this, we schedule more time for our appointments than most clinics. Additionally, we do not see walk-ins, so our scheduled appointments can have our full attention, and we aren’t trying to squeeze people in during another pet’s appointment time or in between appointments. Since we don’t want clients to feel rushed, we also hire more staff to try and be efficient, educational, and more thorough. This means our overhead is more than most clinics with a similar workload.
For these reasons, any missed appointment means much more to our income than it would at other clinics. Also, taking deposits adds to the workload of our receptionists since deposits can’t be made online when clients book an appointment. So, our receptionists must look through each appointment days in advance to see who has paid a deposit and who has not. If there is an appointment without a deposit, the receptionist must call the client and get a deposit. Many times, when that call is made, the client cancels the appointment or doesn’t answer the call. If a client does not answer the call, we can’t be sure if we are calling at a bad time or if they don’t want to leave a deposit (many times, with new clients, they don’t answer the call, and we never hear from them again). So, there is a significant amount of wasted time for our receptionists.
Maybe these new clients would have come in, and we are pushing potential clients away with the deposit policy. Maybe these clients would not have shown up anyway. We can’t be sure.
At one time, our policy was to only require deposits from people who had missed an appointment. So, if a client missed an appointment, they would be required to pay a deposit from that point forward for any appointment. However, most of the people who would not show up for an appointment were new clients. What pushed us to our new policy was that, on a couple of days when the weather was nice outside, people just did not show up for their appointments. We had five no-shows two Fridays in a row and typically averaged a no-show per day otherwise. These no-shows were by both established and new clients.
By requiring deposits for appointments, it allows us to keep our prices lower and provide better service to all clients. While we are not making as much money during that scheduled appointment time as if the client had shown up, we are hopefully not losing money.
To provide the high-quality care we aim for, the amount of time to build personal relationships with clients and pets, and the prices we deem fair, right now, the best plan we have come up with is to require a deposit for appointments."
✨ Takeaway Tips:
1️⃣ Deposits help ensure availability for all pets needing care.
2️⃣ Cancellations made 24+ hours in advance receive a full refund.
3️⃣ This policy helps us keep prices fair while maintaining high-quality service.
Got a question for Dr. Sykes? Comment below, visit our "Ask Your Vet" page, or send us a message—your question could be featured in the next edition! 💙🐾
At Clarksville Animal Clinic, we treat your pets like family. Thank you for considering our clinic for your needs.
